Denmark has a lofty goal for its power sector—to be fully renewable by 2030.

The country is already well on its way there; last year, 40 percent of Denmark’s electricity came from wind energy. But getting to 100 percent poses new challenges, and is going to require new solutions.

The tiny Danish island of Bornholm, which has dubbed itself the “Bright Green Test Island,” is set to play an important role in finding those innovative answers.

This reporting was supported in part by a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

The roof of the Confederation of Danish Industries building is covered in solar panels.

From the roof of the Confederation of Danish Industries building in downtown Copenhagen, Denmark’s energy past and future are within view. Smokestacks from several coal-fired power plants share space on the horizon with a fleet of wind turbines.

But most of those smokestacks are coming down soon. Denmark is transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy—the culmination of a decades-long effort that began with the energy crisis of the 1970s.

“We found out in the 1970s we just used too much energy,” said Iver Nielsen, spokesman for State of Green, a public-private partnership that promotes Denmark’s green economy. Specifically, the country used too much imported oil in its power plants. When prices skyrocketed because of the oil embargo, it was a catastrophe.

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Iver Nielsen is the spokesman for State of Green, a public-private partnership that promotes Denmark\’s green economy.

“We had to say never; we’ll never see this again, we must do something about this,” Nielsen said.

Out of the crisis, a policy direction emerged for the country. Initially, the government promoted energy efficiency and switching to coal-fired power plants, since coal didn’t have the same supply chain issues as oil. But Denmark doesn’t have its own coal reserves either, and as climate change became a concern and technology improved, the country saw an opportunity to use an abundant domestic natural resource: wind.

Now, the country gets almost half its electricity from renewables—39 percent from wind alone.

It has taken decades and lots of government assistance to get to this point. Yet unlike in the U.S., which seemingly changes energy policy with every new President,supportfor renewable energy in Denmark has been consistent across political parties.

“We have had a conservative government, and we have a social democrat government, but the energy policy has continued,” Nielsen said.

Denmark has achieved this remarkable consensus on energy policy in a few ways. First, demographics: the country is smaller than West Virginia, and has 5 million people, compared to 320 million in the U.S. Second, a tiny fossil fuel industry. Denmark doesn’t have much in the way of coal, oil and natural gas, so there’s been little pushback from those industries as the country has shifted away from fossil fuels.Thatconsensus is a big reason why the country’s renewable sector is so well developed.

“These are investments over 30, 40, 50 years, so when you have private investors investing in this,[they] must be sure that the ground they are making the investments on [is] stable,” Nielsen said.

Still, decades of political supportisn’t a requirement for large-scale renewable energy investment, as evidenced by the fact that the United States appears to be heading in a similar direction as Denmark. In 2014, Americans used more renewables than any year since the 1930s, when wood was a primary energy source. Wind and solar are growing fast, even though they still account for just a tiny fraction of total consumption.

But there are serious challenges—both technological and social—that come along with more renewable energy.

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Jesper Rasmussen shows a map of power flow through Denmark.

One is grid stability. Denmark’s grid operators have had to learn in recent years how to keep the grid in balance while increasing the amount of renewable energy to its current level of almost half the country’s power supply.

“Some days the production from our wind turbines will be larger than the total consumption, and some days there’s no wind at all,” said Jesper Rasmussen, the spokesman for Energinet, which runs Denmark’s transmission grid.

Their answer: build a massive transmission system to import and export power to other countries. (Transmission has been a major barrier to building renewable in the U.S.). Rasmussen pointed at a giant map, showing energy flow throughout Denmark and neighboring countries like Sweden, Norway and Germany.

“It was easy to manage 10 percent [renewables],” Rasmussen said, but higher percentages are harder. “When you get 60, 80 percent it will be even more difficult, so at that time you would need storage, you would need flexibility, smart grid.”

By flexibility he means the ability to store power for later, or to use electricity when there is plenty of renewable power available and not when there isn’t. There have been several test projects in Denmark, including the EcoGrid EU project profiled by Inside Energy, but widespread commercial deployment is still a way off.

Part of the problem is no one has heard of the smart grid.

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Jørgen Christensen is the CTO of Dansk Energi, the Danish Energy Assocation.

“If I would ask my sister whether she would have flexible or smart charging of her electric vehicle or heat pump today, she would say ‘well, I haven’t heard about it,’” said Jorgen Christensen, the chief technology officer for Dansk Energi, the Danish energy association. “So that’s where we are.”

Christensen argued that in the past, they focused too much on developing the technical solutions, and not enough on convincing people they’re necessary – something that’s a problem in the U.S., too. Electric cars and smart thermostats exist, but for most people, it’s not clear why they should buy them. Dansk Energi has hired anthropologists and social scientists to figure out how to convince people, but Christensen expects it will take time, maybe a decade or more.

“I think we, in a bit naive way, expected that would just follow automatically,” Christensen said. “And I can assure you that’s not the case.”

This reporting was supported in part by a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Graduate student Alexander Hermann pulls up power flow diagrams for the Danish island of Bornholm in the grid control room at PowerLabDK

On the outskirts of Copenhagen, in a nondescript tan brick building, is a lab that could hold the keys to the electricity grid of the future. PowerLabDK, at the Danish Technical University, has Europe’s largest grid simulator as well as a high voltage test lab, where researchers can create lightning using a massive capacitor bank. But the most exciting feature is largely invisible: a real-time connection to the grid control room on the Danish island of Bornholm.

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The grid simulator or RTDS at PowerLab DK is the largest in Europe.

Bornholm, population 40,000, sits about 100 miles east of Copenhagen, in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The island’s utility, Østkraft, gets a huge share of its electricity from wind and solar, and another large chunk from Sweden and Norway via a sea cable—the only connection between the island and the Nordic power grid. From massive computer monitors on the walls of PowerLabDK, researchers can see the same information about what’s happening on Bornholm as Østkraft’s grid controllers—and “actually a little bit more,” according to Professor Jacob Østergaard, who heads up PowerLabDK.

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Professor Jacob Østergaard heads up PowerLabDK.

Not only can researchers monitor the island’s grid remotely, but they collect all the data and use it to run advanced simulations, testing what would happen if, say, all of the island’s solar suddenly went offline. They can also isolate the island from the rest of the Nordic grid and study it as a closed system.

“We can really stress the solutions that are needed to deal with a lot of fluctuating renewables,” Østergaard said.

In other words, they can use Bornholm as a real-life test lab for the grid of the future.

Last year, Denmark got 40 percent of its electricity from wind. By 2030, the country’s entire power system is supposed to be 100 percent renewable. Unlike traditional energy sources, like gas and coal, wind and solar are highly variable—there one minute, gone the next. That’s a huge challenge for operating the power grid, which has to balance supply and demand in real-time. But by testing out solutions on Bornholm first, researchers are hoping they’ll be ready: “We at the university can sit behind our computer screens and simulate everything, everything goes smooth, no problem, but when you go to reality you really meet all the true challenges,” Østergaard said.

Stephanie Joyce / Inside Energy

The island of Bornholm is a popular tourist destination; it\’s also testing some innovative energy solutions.

Bornholm, though, feels like anything but a lab. In fact, it’s more like a resort. On the ferry to the island, most people are vacationers, going to golf or hike or sail or just hang out at the beach. Bornholm’s unofficial anthem, an upbeat tune from an old movie, with lines about sunshine and smoked herring, plays over the loudspeakers, creating a folksy atmosphere. The ferry docks in the island’s main town of Rønne, a picturesque hamlet full of colorful houses with red roofs that would be a good setting for a postcard photography workshop.

Just a short walk down the coastal road though, the test lab is in full swing, at the headquarters for the island’s utility, Østkraft. It is a massive complex of buildings, housing biomass and biogas plants, along with a giant tower full of water for district heating of the town. “[We want to be] a working society, with young and old [people] that have things to do,” explained Anna Sofie Poulsen, a project manager for the utility who is in charge of the island’s plan to be entirely renewable by 2025. I ask her what people in the community think about being the guinea pig for the grid of the future, but she objects to the characterization. “I don’t think that’s how we see ourselves,” she said. “more as front runners.”

Bornholm’s traditional industries were extractive–fishing and mining–but the fisheries have all but collapsed and the mines are no longer profitable. Tourism now dominates the economy, but Poulsen says that’s not enough to sustain the community. She wants to steal back the label of “innovation hub” from the big cities and the collaboration with PowerLabDK is part of that. Bornholm has branded itself as the Bright Green Test Island, and Poulsen sees a new, green energy economy growing around it.

The strategy appears to be working. Bornholm gets a lot of visitors who are interested in learning about the various energy projects on the island, and how they work together. There are also green energy businesses popping up.

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Peter Sorenson is a chemical engineer who works for Green Solution House, a hotel and conference center featuring green technology.

Witness the Green Solution House, a hotel and conference center a short bus ride from Østkraft that’s been transformed into a showroom for cutting-edge technologies, from solar windows to a pyrolysis plant that generates electricity from food scraps. The hotel’s main tour guide, Peter Sorenson, also happens to be a chemical engineer, which even he admits is a strange skill set for a hotel employee.

“We have a lot of guests who are engineers and architects from all over the world; they want to talk with someone who can speak their language,” he explained.

It’s not exactly what he imagined himself doing with his degree, but it was the job that was available, and as Poulsen put it, “People [on Bornholm] want to be part of solutions, and not just sitting here in this remote island and waiting for the decline.”

This reporting was supported in part by a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

What’s Next?

Listen to our story on one of the specific projects being tested on Bornholm

Rønne is the largest city on the Danish island of Bornholm, a popular tourist destination that is also testing some innovative energy solutions.

The grid control room at Østkraft, on the Danish island of Bornholm, is a mix of old and new. On one side of the room, huge computer monitors detail the flow of electricity throughout the system. On the other, printed circuit diagrams hang on 60s-era control boards with dancing needles. Lounging at a desk in a grey jumpsuit and thick eyeglasses, engineer Erik Malmkvist jams to early 90s dance music, while explaining that his job is to do as little as possible.

“When I shall do anything, it costs us money,” he says. “So, I do as little as possible.”

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Engineer Erik Malmkvist works for Østkraft, the utility on the Danish island of Bornholm. He\’s one of the engineers responsible for keeping the island\’s grid in balance.

Doing as little as possible has gotten more difficult in recent years though, as Bornholm has stepped up its share of renewable energy. It’s much easier to balance a system that relies on coal than on fluctuating power sources, like wind and solar. Malmkvist grabs a graph printing out of one of the analog machines on the wall.

“You can see here the wind, it goes up and down all the time,” he says.

Bornholm gets half of its power from wind and solar. But of course,that power supply is intermittent, and doesn’t always match the times of day when people are using the most electricity. Malmkvist grabs another printout.

“All days look alike,” he says. “You can see, people get up in the morning, about half past 5, and then they go to eat, then don’t do anything anymore.”

Right now, when demand spikes and the wind isn’t blowing, utilities like Østkraft ramp up production at their coal or gas plants, but Denmark is planning to be fossil-fuel free in its power sector by 2030, which means soon, that won’t be an option.

Stephanie Joyce / Wyoming Public Radio

The main Østkraft power plant on the island of Bornholm, powered by coal, biomass and biogas.

So, instead of making supply meet demand, Østkraft is testing what it would take to make demand meet supply.

“Demand response has nothing at all to do with energy savings. It has to do with using the energy when it’s there,” says Maja Bendtsen, who works for the utility and is in charge of a project called EcoGrid EU.

The project has been testing so-called demand response with roughly 2000 households on Bornholm for the last few years. But Bendtsen’s first introduction to the idea of demand response came when she was a kid. Her family had a wind turbine and when the wind was blowing hard, they turned up all the radiator valves in the house.

“Because it was was windy and the wind turbine was spinning anyways, the energy was free and abundant,” she says.

The idea behind EcoGrid is the same: use electricity when there’s plenty of cheap, renewable power, and cut back when there isn’t. The project focuses on heating and cooling, which are among the biggest electricity users, but unlike when Bendtsen was a kid, the EcoGrid project automates it, so no one has to run around opening and closing radiator valves.

“As a participant in the project, you say which temperature do I want,” Bendtsen says. If you want your house to be between 68 and 72 degrees, for example, the utility controls your heating to keep it within that range.

For the utility, that’s valuable: being able to temporarily shut off hundreds or thousands of heaters or air conditioners can keep the electricity grid in balance without having expensive, polluting power plants on standby and without building thousands of miles of new transmission lines.

“We are over-investing because we are not utilizing the energy we produce in a smart way,” says Jørgen Christensen, the chief technology officer of Dansk Energi, the Danish energy association. He says it will be too costly to reach the country’s renewable energy goals without demand response. But convincing customers that there are benefits to allowing someone else to control their heating or electric car charging takes time.

“If it’s totally new for you, you say, ‘let’s wait and see what the neighbor does,’” Christensen says.

That might be the biggest barrier to demand response in Denmark, but what about elsewhere?

In the United States, there are residential demand response projects, but none of them use automation, which limits their potential benefit to the overall grid. Start talking about controlling people’s heating systems in a fiercely independent place like Wyoming though and well, you can imagine how the conversation would go.

This reporting was supported in part by a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.